It’s not easy growing up as a highly-sensitive child (HSC).
When parents know our children are HSCs, we can parent gently and help meet those very real, very intense emotional needs. And help make sure they never get too hungry or over-tired!
But before parents learn about highly-sensitive children, there can be some tough times and even inadvertent trauma for the kiddos.
As I’ve learned the hard way, so-called “tough love” feels like trauma and meanness to a highly-sensitive little one – so you can imagine how bad outright cruelty or insensitivity feels to them.
Then there’s adolescence – a difficult time for anyone, but especially tough for these fragile humans. They feel everything around them so intensely, and adolescence is already a time of intense emotions for everyone.
Highly sensitive kids feel not just their own strong emotions but also those of everyone close to them. They are extremely sensitive not just to emotions, but across all their senses. That can be unbelievably overwhelming and overstimulating.
This world can be extremely hard on highly sensitive young souls; it can even feel hopeless at times. That’s why highly sensitive young people must be given self-care resources, often including access to a good therapist, to help them cope with all of that intensity. They need to learn how to self-soothe and take good care of their emotions. They need to know that they are magic and that things will get easier over time.
The really good news is that there is so much beauty waiting on the other side of growing pains and the tumultuous tween and teen years.
Highly sensitive adults who have been raised with love and thoughtful care – or who have found their own path to healing and wholeness – are literally angels on earth.
There is no one more loving, intuitive, caring, emotionally intelligent or empathy-driven than a highly-sensitive person. They make the absolute best friends, family members and partners. They have beautiful, emotionally rich lives!
I’ve written before that highly sensitive people will save the world and I mean it. If there is hope for our planet and for the human race, it’s in the hands of these highly-evolved and superpowered sensitive humans.
But we have to help them, too. If you know and love a highly sensitive person, ask them how they are doing. Ask them how they are taking care of themselves and protecting their superpowers.
Ask them if they need to talk – and then listen. Let them know they are doing a good job caring for themselves, and ask them if there are ways you can help care for them, too.
No one will ever care for you better than the highly sensitive person in your life – they were literally born to do it. But we need to step up and return the favor. We may not have the same innate emotional and sensory superpowers as HSPs, but we can still up our empathy game and do our best to support these amazing angels.
Are you a highly sensitive person, or do you have a HSP in your life? As always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below or over on Facebook or Instagram.
